ith, but--"

"I know, I know. But all the same--"

"Well, damn it all!" cried Sir Anthony, in a quavering voice, "he died
like a man and there's nothing more to be said."

Presently he looked at his watch.

"By George," said he, "I've only just time to get to my Committee."

"What Committee?" I asked.

"The Lord Lieutenant's. I promised to take the chair."

For the first time Lady Fenimore lifted her stricken face.

"Are you going, Anthony?"

"The boy didn't shirk his duty. Why should I?"

She looked at him squarely and the most poignant simulacrum of a smile
I have ever seen flitted over her lips.

"Why not, darling? Duncan will keep me company till you come back."

He kissed his wife, a trifle more demonstratively than he had ever done
in alien presence, and with a nod at me, went out of the room.

And suddenly she burst into sobbing again.

"I know it's wrong and wicked and foolish," she said brokenly. "But I
can't help it. Oh, God! I can't help it."

Then, like an ass, I began to cry, too; for I loved the boy, and that
perhaps helped her on a bit.

CHAPTER II

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The tag has been all but outworn
during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant phrase
which the judicious shrink from using. Yet to hundreds of thousands of
mourning men and women there has been nothing but its truth to bring
consolation. They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice and thereby
are ennobled. The cause in which they made it becomes more sacred. The
community of grief raises human dignity. In England, at any rate, there
are no widows of Ashur. All are silent in their lamentations. You see
little black worn in the public ways. The Fenimores mourned for their
only son, the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their
grief was stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the
occasion of a tragedy that occurred the year before.

Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had
been drowned in the canal. Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid,
useless. Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no
dying for one's country. There was no dismissing it with a heroic word
that caught in the throat.

I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford
in order to weep over the pain of the world. God knows there is in it
an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day
unfolded befo